all of my active duty references involved peace time services on an air force base.
my va issues dont involve quality but inefficiencies and problems with admin ppl. this is a discussion about us gov healthcare right? maybe as a whole your gov is more efficient. i have 0 confidence in the us gov to run anything successfully except a war.

What are you talking about? I fully support implementing UHC at the state level. What evidence do you think I'm ignoring? You must have me confused with someone else. So long as you try to implement it at the federal level, it's far, far too easy for the corporations to corrupt it and turn it into a corporation money bonanza instead of anything that actually helps the people. Just like they did with Obama's InsuranceCare.

No, the EU is most definitely comparable to the US. We're just 200 years further down the path over here. It's exactly the same thing. I don't know why Europeans aren't learning from our mistakes, but oh wait, yes I know, the corporations want more centralized power so that they can control things better, so they brainwash the masses into thinking it's a good thing. LOL, sheeple. *cries*

No one should be clamoring for it nation-wide regardless. It will NEVER get passed in a form that does anything other than give more to corporations. Only at the state level can you actually get what you want.

I live in Rome, Italy.

Sorry, I misunderstood your overall post. I agree with the bolded - but I definitely don't think it's impossible to implement at the Federal level. My point being that many different countries, with widely varying demographics, have successfully implemented UHC. I find it hard to believe that the US has a total population that is above some point that it becomes unmanageable while everyone else is below this point.

Could you source this? Although you've ignored all my other requests to back up your ridiculous claims (and no, stating info about the life expectancy on your own family does not count as substantiating claims about life expectancy on a population of 300 million people) so I'm not really expecting a response.

I'm sorry physicians aren't on this planet for you to enslave. Also, in this country they get out of medical school owing >$200K in student loans. You realize that capping their wage will just have them opt out of Medicare/Single-Payor Fantasy and only take cash payments? There will always be a two-tiered system. The rich will always get better care. I was thinking about reading all 7 pages of this thread but I'm sure it will just make me sick.

The problem with health care in the United States include the following:
1. Unable to face death (unholy amounts of $$$ spent on increasing life at the end stages of disease)
2. Defensive medicine
3. We don't have "insurance" in this country, we have "health care coverage." ie: no one knows what anything costs, the consumers are insulated from the costs, insurance should be limited to catastrophic events

Awval, how are those different than most other Western countries that have UHC?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 2 - but 1 and 3 certainly apply equally to Canada (and I'm sure many other countries).

Edit: In fact 3 is much less true in the States. Every time I went to the doctor or got any sort of medical service I received a bill (that I didn't have to pay - since I had insurance) detailing the cost of everything I did. In Canada I don't even get that.

I've been sent 3 bills in the last 18 months.

www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Here's the 2007 table from Social Security. Calculate the variance. The s.d. will be over +/-25 years.

Americans would be much more willing to face death, if they were billed for the hopeless efforts to keep their elderly relatives 'alive'.

jogs, you're completely missing the point with respect to life expectancy. Also, you have not been billed over $1600 for calling 911.

Do you have any sources for this either? Because I believe most people don't actually choose expensive 'hopeless' efforts for elderly relatives since expensive procedures are almost always equivalent to painful (or at least high stress on body) procedures.

If the repubs don't kill Obamacare I have several family members who will be much better off. I'll also be able to consider working for myself when I'm 50.

We are the richest country on earth, and in the next 50 below us no one has to worry about these things. Sorry if I don't want to wait a couple more generations for the states to slowly come around.

I'm not willing to produce additional sources til you start producing sources to back your believes.
Forget those procedures. A rest home cost $6,000+ a month. 24/7 home care cost nearly $5,000 a week.

Additional? You've provided exactly one - which 'proved' individual people live varying amounts of time. Yippee!

Of course, that doesn't actually change the fact that the combined life expectancies of a country are a pretty good proxy for how healthy a country is and how good of health care they receive.

I've provided many sources. And the best you can do is spout BS about the WHO being a commie institution that wants to destroy America and make up "advanced statistic" techniques.

I don't believe "rest homes" are covered by health insurance. At least they're not covered by UHC in Canada (of course, there are other social programs to ensure that people don't get left out in the cold or left living alone when they can't provide for themselves anymore). And of course - there are many rest homes that cost less than $6000 a month. 24/7 home care costing $5000/week is also not usually covered by UHC (in Canada at least). And none of these have anything to do with "hopeless" procedures that have little impact on quality/length of life.

You are consistently full of ****.

LOL I like you when posting in OOT but the more I read your posts in Politics, the more I hate you as well.

Except it's not happening on the state level. This is another point you miss. Lots of states have Republitard governments that are ideologically opposed to the idea of UHC, and their poorer or unluckier citizens will therefore have to go without coverage. So what sense does it make for a citizen of Mass. to have access to decent care, but a citizen of, say, Georgia to be sh*t out of luck? Aren't they both Americans?

I mean, if 35,000 Americans were dying each year from terrorist attacks the folks on the right would be in favor of bankrupting the country to invade the Middle East, but make the culprit heart disease or cancer and suddenly it becomes about states' rights. That makes no sense.

Strange that the doctors in the UHC countries are still doing just fine, don't you think? They even have waiting lists to get into medical schools. Can you explain that?

Also, the health of the public IS a concern of government, no matter how much you slice it and dice it. As pointed out earlier, if a virus was threatening to wipe out the entire nation's population your damn right it would be the government mobilizing the entire public health infrastructure to stop it, and every citizen in the country would support that. What is the point of government if not to keep its citizens from dying?

Weird that a post like that would garner this result. Reminds me of the Onion article.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/mit...lp-unin,20097/

Suzzer is happy that his family can be insured and that pisses your off?

Why call it 'government healthcare'? How about 'public healthcare'? The government have just as much input in healthcare (sometimes more) in systems where insurance is required as they do under 'socialised' systems.

Yeah that was such a hatable post you quoted. God forbid I want my uncle to not be completely screwed over by our FUBAR healthcare system.

jogs mostly just makes stuff up. I gave up a while back.

It isn't up to the federal government to tell the states when they will be taking care of a problem.


For everyone that favors UHC, what percentage of people need to be opposed to the plan before you are uncomfortable using force to make them comply?